Ad spending continues with quite-healthy growth, being forecast to increase by about 10% in 2017 according to a studied released this month by the Association of National Advertisers.

At the same time, there’s similarly positive news from digital advertising security firm White Ops on the ad fraud front. Its Bot Baseline Report, which analyzes the digital advertising activities of ANA members, is forecasting that economic losses due to bot fraud will decline by approximately 10% this year.

And yet … even with the expected decline, bot fraud is still expected to amount to a whopping $6.5 billion in economic losses.

The White Ops report found that traffic sourcing — that is, purchasing traffic from inorganic sources — remains the single biggest risk factor for fraud.

On the other hand, mobile fraud was considerably lower than expected. Moreover, fraud in programmatic media buys is no longer particularly riskier than general market buys, thanks to improved filtration controls and procedures at media agencies.

Meanwhile, a new study conducted by Fraudlogix, and fraud detection company which monitors ad traffic for sell-side companies, finds that the majority of ad fraud is concentrated within a very small percentage of sources within the real-time bidding programmatic market.

The Fraudlogix study analyzed ~1.3 billion impressions from nearly 60,000 sources over a month-long period earlier this year. Interestingly, sites with more than 90% fraudulent impressions represented only about 1% of publishers, even while they contributed ~11% of the market’s impressions.

While Fraudlogix found nearly 19% of all impressions overall to be “fake,” its fraudulent behavior does not represent the industry as a whole. According to its analysis, just 3% of sources are causing more than two-thirds of the ad fraud. [Fraudlogix defines a fake impression as one which generates ad traffic through means such as bots, scripts, click-farms or hijacked devices.]

As Fraudlogix CEO Hagai Schechter has remarked, “Our industry has a 3% fraud problem, and if we can clamp down on that, everyone but the criminals will be much better for it.”

That’s probably easier said than done, however. Many of the culprits are “ghost” newsfeed sites. These sites are often used for nefarious purposes because they’re programmed to update automatically, making the sites seem “content-fresh” without publishers having to maintain them via human labor.

Characteristics of these “ghost sites” include cookie-cutter design templates … private domain registrations … and Alexa rankings way down in the doldrums. And yet they generate millions of impressions each day.

The bottom line is that the fraud problem remains huge. Three percent of sources might be a small percentage figure, but that still means thousands of sources causing a ton of ad fraud.

What would be interesting to consider is having traffic providers submit to periodic random tests to determine the authenticity of their traffic. Such testing could then establish ratings – some sort of real/faux ranking.

And just like in the old print publications world, traffic providers that won’t consent to be audited would immediately become suspect in the eyes of those paying for the advertising. Wouldn’t that development be a nice one …

It isn’t so much the size of the problem, but rather its implications.

A recently published report by White Ops, a digital advertising security and fraud detection company, reveals that the source of most online ad fraud in the United States isn’t large data centers, but rather millions of infected browsers in devices owned by people like you and me.

This is an important finding, because when bots run in browsers, they appear as “real people” to most advertising analytics and many fraud detection systems.

As a result, they are more difficult to detect and much harder to stop.

These fraudulent bots that look like “people” visit publishers, which serve ads to them and collect revenues.

Of course, once detected, the value of these “bot-bound” ads plummets in the bidding markets. But is it really a self-correcting problem? Hardly.

The challenge is that even as those browsers are being detected and rejected as the source of fraudulent traffic, new browsers are being infected and attracting top-dollar ad revenue just as quickly.

It may be that only 3% of all browsers account for well over half of the entire fraud activity by dollar volume … but that 3% is changing all the time.

Even worse, White Ops reports that access to these infected browsers is happening on a “black market” of sorts, where one can buy the right to direct a browser-resident bot to visit a website and generate fraudulent revenues.

… to the tune of billions of dollars every year. According to ad traffic platform developer eZanga, advertisers are wasting more than $6 billion every year in fraudulent advertising spending. For some advertisers involved in programmatic buying, fake impressions and clicks represent a majority of their revenue outlay — even as much as 70%.

The solution to this mess in online advertising is hard to see. It isn’t something as “simple and elegant” as blacklisting fake sites, because the fraudsters are dynamically building websites from stolen content, creating (and deleting) hundreds of them every minute.

They’ve taken the very attributes of the worldwide web which make it so easy and useful … and have thrown them back in our faces.

Virus protection software? To these fraudsters, it’s a joke. Most anti-virus resources cannot even hope to keep pace. Indeed, some of them have been hacked themselves – their code stolen and made available on the so-called “deep web.” Is it any wonder that so many Internet-connected devices – from smartphones to home automation systems – contain weaknesses that make them subject to attack?

The problems would go away almost overnight if all infected devices were cut off from the Internet. But we all know that this is an impossibility; no one is going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It might help if more people in the ad industry would be willing to admit that there is a big problem, as well as to be more amenable to involve federal law enforcement in attacking it. But I’m not sure even that would make all that much difference.

There’s no doubt we’ve built a Frankenstein-like monster. But it’s one we love as well as hate. Good luck squaring that circle!

Ad fraud is quite a large issue for online advertisers – and it’s been on many companies’ radar screens for a long time.

But even with the higher visibility and greater scrutiny of online ad fraud, it seems to be a problem that only gets bigger.

The most recent example of the phenomenon came to light a few weeks ago, when ad fraud prevention consulting firm Pixalate announced that a newly discovered botnet has been draining literally billions of dollars from advertisers’ MarComm coffers.

The botnet is dubbed Xindi – the same name as the hostile aliens in the Star Trek sci-fi TV series.

Xindi is making money for its creators by serving actual ads – but to simulated audiences. It has spread via familiar methods such as phishing.

Pixalate estimates that just shy of 78 billion fake ad impressions have been racked up so far. Even at low cost-per-impression revenue figures, the high volume amounts to several billions of dollars of illicit revenues siphoned (and counting).

What makes the Xindi botnet particularly nettlesome is that it’s designed to go after computers and networks at high-end organizations, enabling it to “mimic” desirable web traffic (i.e. affluent consumers).

According to Pixalate, already there could be as many as 8 million computers compromised in more than 5,000 networks, including a goodly number of Fortune 500 companies as well as university and governmental networks.

To counteract Xindi, Pixalate recommends that the Internet Advertising Bureau update its protocols to factor in the pace of ad requests, so that impression generated after a certain time period cannot be accepted as valid — and hence would be non-billable.

Whether this or other remedies will actually happen is up in the air at the moment (the IAB isn’t onboard with the recommendations).

Either way, what seems clear is that whatever the remedial actions that are taken, burgeoning ad fraud activity is bound to continue.

The question is, can it ever be contained, or will it just continue to grow and grow? If you have any thoughts or ideas on the challenge, please share them with other readers.